The Great Gatsby (2013)
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Nick Carraway arrives in New York in 1922, an era of loose morals, glittering jazz and bootleg kings. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick encounters the mysterious millionaire Gatsby and his bewitching cousin Daisy. Soon, Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super-rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. Bearing witness to this new world, Nick pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and unforgettable tragedy -- mirroring our own times and struggles.
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37 films that influenced The Great Gatsby
What critics say influenced The Great Gatsby
While the contemporary music for Moulin Rouge! was adapted to evoke the film’s time period, the music in The Great Gatsby is used in a way more akin to the way Sophia Coppola used music in Marie Antoinette (2006).
The soundtrack for Gatsby and Daisy's love story, much like the one heard in "Moulin Rouge!" and countless other films, including Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," is gleefully way, way out of period.
It is “superficially superficial,” to borrow a phrase from a far greater film that explores similar themes, The Earrings of Madame de…
There's a scene in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio's hyperrich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less prosperous friend Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire).
The closest cinema has come to what Fitzgerald achieved was, of course, Citizen Kane, and Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane have been compared and contrasted endlessly by university students over the decades.
As impressive as DiCaprio's contributions are (this guy would make a terrific Charles Foster Kane for any filmmaker brave enough to remake "Citizen Kane") Luhrmann's oddly faithful adaptation of Fitzgerald's great American novel celebrates style over substance.
Luhrmann uses 3-D less as a stunt than as a way to gain depth of field (attained in “Citizen Kane” — that most “Gatsby”-esque of stories — through camera and lighting), as well as a comment on novelty, technology and shifting aesthetic expectations.
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Rarely included in official “Gatsby” inventories, 2002’s quite curious “G” found an analog for Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age in the world of contemporary music’s hip-hop elite, long before Luhrmann saw fit to enlist Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter as a collaborator on his film’s cheerfully anachronistic soundtrack.
And the less said about G, the 2002 “hip-hop Gatsby” from director Christopher Scott Cherot, the better.
"G," by Christopher Scott Cherot, is being billed as a modern-day hip-hop version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby."
There’s the all-black Gatsby (2002’s risible G) and the shockingly seductive 2010 stage production (Gatz) that grows out of one man reading the entire novel aloud at work.
My favorite Luhrmann to date wasn't a film at all: It was his 2002 Broadway staging of Puccini's "La Boheme," which was full of grand concepts and bold design strokes, far more selectively handled.
Luhrmann introduces him in a garish, frenzied party scene near the movie’s start in the way a matinee idol would have been in twenties flicks—via a luminous shot in which his slightly smiling face is shown bathed in light, startlingly reminiscent of the first appearance of Orson Welles’ Harry Lime in “The Third Man” (whom DiCaprio actually resembles)—and he immediately takes hold of the screen, and the entire film.
Luhrmann has more success with Gatsby, who lurks around the edges the way Harry Lime does in The Third Man , before making his sudden appearance at one of his parties.
(Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “Cleopatra” being two of the most famous examples.)
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Dr. Walter Perkins (Jack Thompson, "Breaker Morant," "Australia") suggests writing, Nick's former dream occupation, as therapy, and off we go into a land of too much narration by the cast member least able to do it justice.
(Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “Cleopatra” being two of the most famous examples.)